Halfway Down the Stairs

by Gary A Braunbeck

  I know this last part because Don Hogan and his family lived on the north side, and every Monday he’d come in to work with another list of things that had happened during the previous Sunday. Mostly it was minor stuff like windows rattling or his wife’s glassware being shook off a shelf, but it was Don’s kid usually provided him with the biggest complaints.

  “I swear to Christ,” he’d say, “that damn kid’s afraid of his own shadow. Yesterday, when they started in over at the quarry, he comes running into the house all crying and shaking because he thinks there are giant monsters coming. I keep telling Cathy not to let him stay up on Friday nights and watch Chiller Theater, but does she listen to me? Hell no. Then we gotta put up with him having nightmares and shit and thinking that giant monsters are out there walking around Cedar Hill every Sunday afternoon. I don’t know what we’re gonna do with the likes of him, I really don’t.”

  The likes of him. That’s just what he said, and in those four little words I knew right away that Don and Cathy Hogan didn’t much like their own son. I felt for the kid, I did, but how a man manages his own house is his own business and it ain’t nobody else’s place to tell him how to do things otherwise.

  I got to meet his kid a couple of weeks later. There was a company picnic out at Mound Builder’s Park that Sunday, and rare as it was for the company to shell out any extra money for its employees’ benefit, everyone came and brought their families with them. (You offer an afternoon of free food and beer and soda pop, you’d better watch out.) Anyway, Don’s kid was named Kyle. He was seven. A small, thin, fair-haired and -skinned nervous kid who wore glasses and spent most of the afternoon with his nose buried in a stack of comic books while the other kids played games and sports. He struck me as having a lot on the ball, had those kind of eyes where there was always something going on behind them. None of the other kids paid him much mind, which seemed like something he was used to, so he’d brought the comic books along.

  I wandered over to where he was sitting and introduced myself. I have to tell you, he was one courteous and well-mannered little guy. He stood up and shook my hand all adult-like and said it was a pleasure to meet me. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you, sir.” Said it just like that.

  “I work at the plant with your dad,” I said. “He talks about you a lot.” Which was within spitting distance of a lie, but I didn’t think it my place to tell this kid that his dad hardly ever talked about him, except to make fun of him.

  Kyle seemed to sense right off I was white-washing something, because he got this look in his eyes like he wanted to believe me—it would’ve been the greatest thing in the world if his dad did talk proud of him, you could just tell the kid wanted that more than anything—but then he looked over to where the other kids were deep into a serious ball game, saw the way his dad was cheering the kids on and not looking over in his direction, not even once, and his whole body kind of deflated.

  “What’cha reading there?” I asked, pointing to the stack of comics.

  “Just comics.”

  “Anything good?”

  He shrugged. “Ghost Rider, mostly. I think he’s a neat hero.”

  “Ever read Green Lantern?”

  “No, sir.”

  “How about Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner?”

  “You know about the Sub-Mariner?” Ought to’ve seen the way he looked at me right then. There’s a grown-up who reads comics? What’s the world coming to?

  So I sat down next to him and we talked about Prince Namor and Spider-Man and Hawk-Man and monster movies and the like (I had a nephew who was really into those things so, being a good uncle, I stayed current on important matters such as these), and somewhere in there I happened to look down and see that one of Kyle’s shoes had a thicker sole than the other one, and that’s when I realized, genius that I am, that he had a club foot. Turns out he also had asthma, because he had to use his inhaler once when got real excited talking about The Green Hornet and lost his breath.

  “So what’cha want to be when you grow up, Kyle?” I asked after he’d settled down and got his breath back.

  “I wanna ... I wanna write stories. About spaceships and monsters and ghosts and things, like that Rod Serling does.”

  “You watch them Twilight Zone re-runs, do you?”

  “Uh-huh. And that one movie? Night Gallery? A man on television said that they’re gonna make a weekly series out of that this year. That’ll be so cool. So I’m gonna be a writer.”

  “That’ll make your folks proud,” I said because it seemed like the kind of thing you ought to say to a kid. Then Kyle looked over at his folks, at the way they were cheering the other kids on, and he started to cry.

  I felt about an inch tall right then. Here I’d come over to give the kid some company, cheer him up and make sure he wasn’t feeling too lonely, and I wind up reducing him to tears. Me and Maggie, we never had any kids, but I’d like to think if we’d had, we would’ve been real supportive of whatever dreams they found appealed to them. I’d’ve been damned proud to have me a kid who wanted to be a writer. Ain’t nothing better to me than to spend the weekend curled up with a good book, nosir. I read Raymond Chandler and Ray Bradbury and writers like that who tell stories like they’re reciting poetry. Never much good with words myself, I admired that, and I thought it was just terrific that Kyle wanted to write and I told him so but it didn’t stop him from crying and trying to turn away so I wouldn’t see it.

  “Don’t your folks think that’s a good idea?” I asked him, realizing that I was about to cross a line that men don’t talk about among themselves, the line where you go from being just an outsider to someone who knows their private business. It’s one thing when you’re invited to cross the line; it’s another thing altogether when you take it upon yourself to do the crossing, but no way in hell was I just gonna get up and walk away from this kid with his inhaler and his club foot and nervous ways. My guess was everybody’d been walking away from him at times like this for most of his life and probably sleeping the sleep of the just after. No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

  I looked around to see if anybody was watching us, then reached out and put my hand on Kyle’s shoulder. “Hey, c’mon now, it’s all right.”

  “No it isn’t,” he said. “Mom and Dad, they think I’m useless—that’s what Dad’s always saying. ‘You’re useless.’ I wish I could be a ball-player but I can’t run too good, and I can’t always catch my breath.”

  “Those things aren’t your fault, though, Kyle. You can’t help that you were born with problems like those.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I’m a sissy.”

  “Why, just because you don’t like the things other kids do?”

  “Uh-huh.” Said so seriously that I knew deep in his heart he believed it. It was easy to understand why: if you were a male in Cedar Hill and wanted to be accepted by the other fellahs, you had to be a White, Athletic, Semi-Articulate, Beer-Drinking Poon-Tang Wrangler who drove a pickup with at least one hunting rifle displayed in the back window, or the son of a man like that. If you were like Kyle, though, if you were a poor, blue-collar, crooked-toothed, skinny, four-eyed, club-footed asthmatic who was more interested in comic books and Night Gallery and spaceships than in sports and fighting and hunting, well, then, you were a sissy, a queer, an easy target for ridicule because you couldn’t fight back. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of decent folks in this community, but there’s also more than enough assholes to go around—and Don Hogan was definitely an asshole. So was his wife, but I didn’t find that out for sure until later, and by then ...

  Okay, so here I am in the park that afternoon and Kyle’s crying because his dad don’t think much of him or what he wants to be when he grows up. “He says it’s stupid,” Kyle whispered. “He says that only smart people can write books an’ make any money an’ I’m not smart, I’m a sissy who can’t do anything an’ he says ... he says that he’s ashamed of me.”

  I didn’t kn
ow what to say to him about that. I had half a mind to march over and knock ol’ Don’s teeth right down his throat, but that’d probably come back on Kyle real hard so I just stayed put.

  “Do you think it’s stupid?” I asked.

  “I think I’d be a good writer. I already wrote a bunch of stories.”

  “Ever show ‘em to your folks?”

  “They don’t want to see them. Mom says she can’t read without her glasses but she never looks for them so she can read my stories. Once I found ‘em for her so she could read a story I wrote about the people who live in the caves on the moon, an’ she ... she smacked me hard in the face. She said I was being smart with her, but I wasn’t. I swear I wasn’t.”

  “Maybe she was having a bad day. I’m sure she didn’t mean it.” I was trying to give Cathy the benefit of a doubt. The only thing harder than being a blue-collar worker in this town is being the wife of one. It was that way back in 1970 and it hasn’t changed much today, you ask me. Most of the gals in this town, they’re brought to not to expect much out of life and so they don’t. You get yourself a high-school education (Cedar Hill has the lowest graduation requirements in the state), find yourself a job, and if you’re lucky you marry a man with a steady job and do what’s required to make a good home for you and yours—and if that means having to back down and suffer his occasional cruelties, that’s just part and parcel of marriage. So I gave Cathy Hogan the benefit of a doubt.

  “They’ll come around, Kyle,” I said, hoping he believed it because I for one had my doubts. “I bet they’ll come around and be really proud of you.”

  “Dad scares me.”

  Didn’t quite know how to take that. “Scares you how?”

  “He likes scaring me. Sometimes he comes into my room at night after I’m asleep and holds a pillow over my face until I wake up. He makes me fight him off ‘cause he says I need to learn to fight on account of I’m such a weakling. And sometimes he’ll sneak up behind me and shout and make me jump. He laughs at me then. Says I gotta ... what is it? ‘Grow a spine.’ That’s what he says.”

  The ball game was really heating up now, folks were on their feet and shouting, whistling, making all kinds of noise, and then they started up over at the quarry with PIP. Everybody winced and looked over in the direction of the quarry, shaking their heads and complaining about the noise. Fact of the matter is, the noise and vibrations weren’t so bad in the park, not so that the day was going to be ruined. Seemed to me that if anything was going to do that, it was the dark rain-clouds in the sky. I decided right then it was time for Kyle and me to go over and get ourselves a couple of hamburgers, so I turned back to him and said, “Hey, why don’t we mosey—”

  The rest of it died in my throat.

  Kyle was rigid as a board and pale as a corpse. I’ve never seen a kid that scared before. He was holding his breath and his eyes were so wide I thought they might pop right out of his skull.

  “Kyle, hey buddy, what’s wrong?” I laid a hand on his arm and felt how he was shaking, the kind of shakes you usually think of when someone talks about getting the DTs; this boy was shaking right down to the insides of his bones.

  And he still wasn’t breathing.

  “Hey, buddy,” I said, trying to work his inhaler from his pocket, “are you all right? Do you need—”

  “They’re coming!” he screamed so loud that half the folks watching the game turned around to look at us.

  “Kyle, hey, what—”

  “They’re coming, they’re coming, THEY’RE COMING!” And now he was up on his feet and looking around him like a bank robber who’d just run out to hear the police sirens screaming down on his ass and I knew he was gonna bolt, so I tried to grab hold of his arm again but he was so far into panic I didn’t have a chance and then he was off like a shot screaming how they were coming they were coming everybody had to hide everybody had to get away before they got here because they’d kill us all and by then I was on my feet and going after him, but there’s a lot of difference between the speed of a terrified seven-year-old even if he does have a club foot and a fifty-year-old factory worker with a tricky back but now the game was stalled and some of the players got into the act and just as I gained some ground one of the teenagers had easily tackled Kyle and knocked his glasses off and Kyle was thrashing around and screaming at the top of his lungs and crying so hard that snot flew out in ribbons and covered his face that was getting redder and redder by the second, and all the time he kept shrieking on about how they were coming they were coming didn’t anybody hear them and look up there can’t you see their shadows starting block out the sun ohgod please everybody has to hide before they kill us all—

  —and then he stopped screaming because he couldn’t get air into his lungs; even from where I was I could hear the way he was wheezing, how his throat was making all these wet crackling sounds, so I pushed my way past the crowd of gawkers who’d gathered round and had to shove the teenager who’d tackled Kyle off the boy because the idiot was parked with his knees on Kyle’s chest, then I had Kyle sitting up and was holding his inhaler for him but he was still thrashing around in panic and by now Don and Cathy had come over, both of them looking for all the world like the most humiliated couple God had ever created, looking more embarrassed for themselves than concerned over their boy, and I managed to get the inhaler in Kyle’s mouth and gave him a couple of pumps but he didn’t get it all, he jerked his head away and tried to scream as he saw the shadow that was falling over the park from the rain clouds, I knew that’s what was scaring him because he pointed to the shadow and croaked out something like “...sore hay...” and then his eyes rolled up into his head and his legs shuddered and he wet himself and passed out.

  An ambulance had to be called to come get him, and they hooked him up to some oxygen and loaded him into the back and took off for Memorial. By now it was starting to rain and what folks weren’t running for one of the covered shelters or their cars were gathered around Don and Cathy offering their sympathies and trying to think of things to say to make them feel better about being so embarrassed by their boy.

  All I could do was stand there and shake my head, listening to the constant whump-whump-whump! from PIP at the quarry and looking at Kyle’s inhaler that I still held in my hand.

  * * *

  By the time I got over to the emergency room the rain was coming down pretty hard. It was lightning and thundering to beat the band, too. I got inside and found Don and Cathy in the waiting room, both of them smoking one cigarette after another (you could still smoke in hospitals back then). I wondered if they both smoked like that around the house, knowing how it would affect Kyle’s asthma, but I didn’t say anything about it. Didn’t seem like the right time for a lecture.

  “How is he?” I asked.

  Cathy just gave me a look that would have frozen fire and went back to her smoking. Don looked at her none-too pleasantly, then shook his head and said, “They got him back there but we haven’t been told anything yet.”

  I handed him the inhaler. He looked at it like it was a piece of dog shit, then snatched it out of my hand and whirled on Cathy. “How many goddamn times have I told that kid to keep this on him? Christ! Sometimes I think he doesn’t have the sense God gave an ice-cube!”

  “He had it on him,” I said. “He just dropped it when he took off like that.” I didn’t care about this lie, not one little bit.

  “Doesn’t make any difference,” Don said, not looking away from Cathy. “You gonna say something or just sit there like a knothole on a log?”

  “I’m sorry that he embarrassed us in front of all your buddies,” she said.

  “You got that right. Kid’s been nothing but a pain in the ass since he came into this world. If you hadn’t listened to that quack doctor of yours, putting you on Thalidomide—”

  “—which I stopped taking after the first month. I heard the stories. Besides, it made me feel sick all the time.”

  “You shouldn’t’ve took
it in the first place! If you hadn’t, maybe we’d’ve had a normal kid with good feet and healthy lungs and—”

  “—so now it’s my fault Kyle’s sickly? Oh, you’re really a fucking prize sometimes, Donald, you know that?”

  “I’ll thank you not to—”

  They both realized I was still standing there and got real quiet. I was trying to think of a graceful way to leave when the doctor came out and told us that Kyle was going to be all right but they were going to keep him overnight to just to make sure. “It was a fairly serious episode,” he said. “It could have been fatal. Has he been taking his medications?”

  “When we can afford them,” said Cathy. “But we always make sure he’s got his inhaler.” She let out a long stream of smoke, and I knew the doctor was thinking the same thing I had when I saw them puffing away.

  “Would you like to see him?”

  “Not particularly,” said Don. “I have to go to work in the morning to make the money to pay for this goddamned hospital visit.” He looked at Cathy, who wouldn’t look at him, then turned to me and said, “You two were getting all buddy-buddy there. Why don’t you go back and see him, Jackson?”

  “Think I will, thank you.”

  They had him off in room by himself, all hooked up to an oxygen tank with a mask over his nose and mouth. He looked fifty years old, all pale and sweaty with dark half-crescents under his eyes. He smiled when he saw it was me and waved.